The Constant Conflict: Individual versus Society
Ever since the dawn of our species, we have been quite a social one. Many of our behavioral adaptations oriented us toward a lifestyle in which other members of the tribe felt comfortable with. We hunted in groups, because sometimes we set out to hunt animals way larger than ourselves, mammoths, for instance. And also probably to protect ourselves against large predatory animals ,such as saber-toothed tigers. We lived in groups possibly because finding mates would be much easier that way, and because infant upbringing was of crucial importance among us, with our infants being particularly weak and having underdeveloped brains compared with most other mammalian species.
Our adaptations worked quite well. In fact, there is a hypothesis that says we outcompeted the Neanderthals in Europe because we cooperated much better with our tribe members. But the same brain capacities that helped us survive and outcompete rival species also made for a gradual, but exponential boost of technology in our cultures.
Technology, in my opinion, is not something human-exclusive. Simple tool making can be seen in numerous species of birds and mammals. Chimpanzees use narrow sticks to get insects out of wood logs, or use stones to break oil palm nuts. Crows are also excellent tool makers. One species of crows, the New Caledonian Crow (Corvus moneduloides) is especially adept at tool making. In one well known experiment, researchers put food in a bucket and put the bucket in a larger barrel-like container. The container was too tall for the crows' beak to reach the bucket. The crows were given a thin, flexible wire which they had never seen before. To the researchers' surprise, the crows bent the wire and used it as a hook to bring the bucket up.
We humans are way better than that. It seems very surprising for us to observe a crow do something like the experiment mentioned above, but for a human its baby work. Even when we weren’t much advanced in technology, we managed to tame fire. We managed to make weapons. We managed to create art. Under gradual and at the same time exponential growth of technology we managed to get what we have now.
The most obvious between Paleolithic societies and modern societies is their size. A typical human tribe 50,000 years ago would hardly be 50 strong, while a typical modern city contains hundreds of thousands of people living densely together. Hundreds of thousands, for a species that was evolved to live in groups of a few tens! To visiting aliens, this would be a very challenging question to answer. How is it possible that these barely social mammals (compared with social Hymenopteran or Isopteran insects-ants and termites, for instance) to live in such huge groups? And it's not just that, on a higher level, cities are united as countries, which often consist of millions of people grouped as one.
So we can imagine a hierarchy of human organization, with the lowest level being the individual, proceeding upward to the core family, and the extended family, in the simplest human societies (the hunter-gatherer societies). It would be very plausible if there were no stable level above the mentioned two in a society where the main replicators were genes. Such is the way it is in most animal groups (with the social insects' exception). There is little benefit of coexisting with a none-relative, and if there were tit-for-tat strategies at work, which are cooperative strategies between distantly related individuals, the society would not grow beyond certain limits, because if it did, individuals could cheat and get away with it easily. Thus in extremely large societies, tit-for-tat would not be an ESS (Evolutionary Sustainable Strategy). Therefore there must be some other explanation for the unexpectedly large human societies.
The human brain is exclusively capable of generating, storing, and transferring ideas. Ideas, or Memes, can be seen as genuine replicators, evolving in human societies much faster than the genes (that is, in my opinion, the apparent 'cease' in human genetic evolution in the Pleistocene). By being replicators, I mean to imply that any characteristic they might have that could somehow increase their number of copies in the next generation, or in a sense, their speed of replication; means they will become more abundant and will replicate even more. Such characteristics may include human behavior, and sometimes collective human behavior which can be a social convention, a norm, a set of laws, a belief system, or an ideology.
With such ideas as those mentioned above, it seems possible that humans could actually find a way to stick together in larger groups than a few tens. However, if I were a hunter living in a forest, I would never give up my simple way of life for one in which I had to farm and herd in order to get food. Why wouldn't I? After all, life in a village is much more peaceful and stable, and my human greed would tell me to do so. But on the other hand, it lacks the sense of excitement and freedom we were used to. So even if a number of lazy humans would want to settle down and live a life of horticulture, I doubt this could mean any transition; since for an entire tribe, and after that, for many tribes to settle down, there must have been a driving force working behind. Imagine a tribe of humans living in, say, southern Europe. They live their lives of hunting and gathering, in relative peace with other humans, with social equality, and almost no wealth. There is simply very little tendency for such a tribe to fuse with some others or grow much larger to form a horticultural society living in a rather permanent village. Individuals would not easily conform to leadership, and they would find it rather difficult to live alongside people they couldn't trust as easily. And for an entire tribe to submit into a new lifestyle as such, all or most members of the tribe probably had to agree. So why did our ancestors do that? Simple: because they had to.
Scientific data reveals a rather large period of famine around 10,000 years ago that was the most probable evolutionary pressure for many humans to become horticultural. Imagine yourself living in a hunter-gatherer tribe and seeing that life is not the way it used to be. The elders complain there was more hunt in the past and the spirits must have turned against us. The old ways of life are not working anymore. If you are lucky, your tribe will learn from other tribes and begins to invent new things, or new ideas. And eventually, learn that in order to survive, it must cooperate with other tribes way more than it did in the past, maybe even agree to live with them and become one, very large tribe, which has chosen to settle down at least much of the year. There is little to hunt, so you must rely on poorly farmed plant material, and your domestic goats or cows (if you have any).
But for members of such a large society of more than a few tens, sometimes a few hundred in horticultural societies, and in higher levels up to industrial ones which may consist of millions to coexist, while many of them are not from the same families (not even the same extended families), there needs to be some sort of adhesive. We discussed that neither altruism for close relatives nor tit-for-tat will do. I assume we must search for the answer in memes such as social conventions, laws, etc.
It is almost obvious how a set of laws can let a large number of humans live together. Criminals, or in a Game Theory sense, the defects or the cheaters, are punished, and thus their strategy won't be able to spread. Social conventions are not genetically inherited, but individuals in a society learn them to interact with other individuals in a way that keeps the society together (if the conventions aren't good for that purpose, they will be eliminated through the process of natural selection-in this case, cultural selection). A belief system holds the individuals together by making them believe they have to be together in some way. Religions, for example, give their followers gods to worship, and unite under. Patriotism says that individuals must always remain loyal to their countries and give their lives for it if they must. Ideologies such as Socialism tell the individuals that they must share in order to have a better, and richer, society.
Once again I feel the urge to point out the importance of memes as replicators. The 'fitness' of a meme/gene, is its share of copies in the total of next generation's memes/genes, sometimes called the meme/gene pool. That can also be called its evolutionary success in a sense. The individual does not matter at all for the replicator, it only cares about itself. The reason for altruism in many species is that sometimes, a squirrel ensures the survival of its genes by sacrificing itself and letting a close relative, who shares many genes with the individual, live. The individual dies, but the gene survives. So we can obviously see that the individual's behavior is oriented towards the survival of the replicator only. The same is true for memes. A soldier sacrificing himself for his country is terminating his own life, as the patriotism meme complex commands him to.
Can we say that the soldier sacrificed himself against himself? What is the meaning of the benefit for an individual? In my opinion, it means nothing; at least, not for any species other than humans. In the soldier example, the soldier sacrificed its genes for the memes. If a soldier went to war while he had no offspring, his genetic fitness would drop significantly. One might say that, in an altruistic sense, the soldier ensured the survival of his relatives, which are his country mates. But that argument is invalid for several reasons:
1. The soldier's role in decreasing the risk for his country mates is very little.
2. The soldier gains very little in a genetic sense, because most people in his country are extremely far relatives (sometimes even farther than the foe) and will count not as people for whom one might want to risk his life for, but rather people whom one might want to compete with.
3. The risk of losing one's life in a war is very large.
We can now see that, according to Hamilton's rule, such a behavior cannot be kin selection (altruism toward relatives), because rB<<C, with r being genetic relatedness, B being the benefit gained by the recipient, and C being the cost to the individual performing the act. With the soldier's genes' fitness falling in almost every sense, we must rely on a memetic explanation for this behavior.
What we can see here is a competition between genes and memes to control an individual's behavior. Imagine the soldier, faced with a situation in which he can either die and make for his nation's progress in war, or flee, and save his genes. There is a meme, I believe, called 'your country above yourself'. If the meme is strong enough in that soldier, he will probably sacrifice himself despite the feeling that he must survive.
Let's bring up another example. Christian priests of many sects abstain from having sexual intercourse. This, too, is a huge disadvantage for the individual's genes, so there must be a strong meme behind this behavior: Christian faith.
The gene/meme competition can also be viewed from another perspective rather than their ability to control individuals: their ability to survive in the multidimensional social space. Let us analyze the soldier's sacrifice and the priest's abstinence from this point of view. The soldier's sacrifice is very likely to contribute to the success of his nation in the war and the meme's fitness will increase by either the observation of other individuals of the sacrifice behavior and them choosing to take the behavior as they see their nation win, or by the survival of a nation in which such behaviors are valued, or most often, a combination of both, each contributing to the other. As for the priest's abstinence, religious faith seems to have a very strong appeal to most people, and that should be the major way of its survival. However, the abstinence itself can have an appealing effect, as many people might think abstinence can make for a more peaceful and virtuous life.
Not all memes orient us toward social stability. Remember the criminals, or cheaters. They too have their behavior driven by a gene/meme combination. The combination commands them to steal, for instance, to get some bread to survive. There are multiple genes and memes at work, and one of them is the social convention of 'do not steal'. But in a thief, that one has lost its weight, while at the same time, in many members of the societies it hasn't. The meme is powerful because if it died out, the society would fall into chaos.
The criminal is a somewhat extreme example. Let us imagine a simpler one: a philandering man. Getting involved in sexual relations with different partners may not be a crime in many cultures, but it is still frowned upon. Why would it be frowned upon when the philandering man causes no apparent harm to the society? In my opinion, it’s a huge meme complex called 'respect the social conventions, and expect others to respect them'. The philandering man seems to be disrespecting the monogamy social convention, and/or several others.
Yet another simpler example would be a radical thinker, or even an artist. A radical thinker might bring up ideas that are not very much liked by the rest of the society, thus slightly making others despise him. The same is true with an artist that does not tend to 'follow the rules'. The society, sometimes unconsciously, tries to impose their generally accepted ideas to those who think differently. I would call this general social intolerance and rejection.
This can be true even for people who act slightly selfish or arrogant. Such traits are considered bad and unlikeable because a person possessing such traits is less likely to get along well with others, and is more likely to ignore 'respect the social conventions, and expect others to respect them'. However, selfishness can be very beneficial for individuals and their genes, even some of their memes. A selfish individual gains more in a human society where you are very unlikely to meet another individual twice, but still, are societies don’t (or yet haven’t) broken apart. That is because of the much powerful 'respect the social conventions, and expect others to respect them' meme, partly at least. So we can somehow say that there is a constant conflict between an individual, his memes and genes to be precise, and the much larger and complex social memes, mass planted in most individuals of the society. Those individuals who tend to be more independent are more likely to disobey such memes: written or unwritten rules, or social conventions. And at the same time, they are more likely to follow their more personal interests, while being slightly or heavily frowned upon, or sometimes even laughed at, by the members of their own society. I believe it has a price such individuals pay, in order to take joy in achieving their personal aims. And it is most often these individuals that perform remarkable feats, and the reason behind that is if they didn't let go of the mass memes, they would never do anything new and different. Very simple logic.
